00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 119, "Frequently Asked Questions About My Divorce." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:24 

Alright. Hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. This is Tanya. I am so glad you're here. If you're new, an extra big welcome to you. And if you've been listening for a while, thank you so much. It means more to me than you will ever know to be able to share things with you that make a difference and that I hope improve your lives. I just got such a sweet note this last week and I just reread it. And it just really touched my heart from someone that I don't know, who just found me on Facebook and sent me a sweet note that just said how much these podcasts are helping her. And it just brought tears to my eyes then and I just reread it and it brought tears to my eyes again. And if there's anything I want to do, it's make the world a better place. And I hope that this is doing that for you. 

01:21 

Alright, so today is going to be a little bit different. I have had in the last few weeks several people ask me about some questions about my divorce. And I think that there's a lot of people who really struggle in marriages. Marriages are just tough. I think they're supposed to be messy and tough on purpose. But sometimes not as tough as they are. And I think that's why so many of us end up getting divorced, because there's so many issues that seem unresolvable. And maybe they are, maybe they aren't. I don't know. Everybody's situation is so different. I know that several years before I got divorced, someone that I knew was getting divorced and at that point I had just been white-knuckling it for probably, I don't know, 18 years or so and I remember being very judgmental and thinking "well, if I can make it work, anybody could make it work," because I knew how tough my marriage was and, you know, life changes you. Isn't it just amazing? Isn't it wonderful that we have the opportunity to see things from a new point of view and to change what we think and what we see and become different people? It wasn't too many years after that that I decided that divorce was the best option for me and for my family and then I understood in a way that I had never understood before. It's so easy to be judgmental of people when we don't have any idea what their point of view is. 

02:50 

So, anyway, I've had some people in the last few weeks approach me and ask me some questions about my divorce and so I thought, you know what, I'm going to put together some of the most frequently asked questions that I get from people. I think because I'm generally pretty open about it, I'm not a person that feels like I have to hide a lot. People ask me questions, and in fact, one person asked me a question, they're like, "oh, I'm sorry if that came..." and I'm just like, "not even. Ask me whatever." I'm totally open about it. I don't have issues with people knowing about stuff in my life. I'm not somebody who's going to put things on Facebook. I think in fact, when my ex-husband and I got divorced, there was no Facebook announcement. Just several months later, my status quietly went from "married" to "divorced" and in fact, we had people at church who four and five months later, I had a woman from church come up and she's like, "I just found out you're divorced. I had no idea," and it was just very quiet and that's kind of how I tend to approach things. I'll be very quiet about it, but if you have questions, I'm totally open to share. I will say that, with the exception of very close family and friends, I'm pretty darn good at not putting my ex-husband's stuff out there. That's not my business, but I will tell you about my experience and that's what I want to talk about today. Here we go. 

04:22 

The first question, probably the most frequent one that I get from people who are struggling as well is the question, "how did you know that it was time to get divorced?" Some of this that I'm going to share today, I've shared on a few previous podcasts when I've talked about divorce, but I'll just re-share it again for those who may be new and may not have had a chance to listen to those. It was quite a process. I probably went 20 years, the whole time, just really, really. struggling with my marriage. I was daydreaming all the time about what it would be like if I was not married and how it would be and how wonderful it would be. It was just such a tough, tough place and I did not have the emotional skills to manage the the challenges and to make them better. I didn't have the skills. I didn't grow up with those skills. My family was not an emotionally close family. We were very close, but not emotionally, right? We didn't share emotions and talk about those things. 

05:21 

And I also was of the mindset that I didn't get married to get divorced. Marriage is a 100-100. You know those cute little phrases that are really great unless you're in a horrible marriage and then they're very destructive? I think they keep people in places where they shouldn't be for much longer than they probably should be. But I knew the time was coming. There are two main times that that really it really came together for me. The first time was about 20 years into my marriage. I was listening to a parenting book and I was driving in my car and...oh no, this wasn't the parenting book. Sorry, this was John Lund, an LDS psychologist, talking about love and it was, like, a four-part presentation series that I checked out from the library. In that, he stopped for a minute to talk to divorced women, and he just said, "maybe God knew that your marriage wasn't going to be a forever marriage, but maybe he also knew that this situation was the exact situation that you needed to be in to be able to grow into the person that you needed to grow into." 

06:31 

And I know that this is not the case for everybody, but I will tell you that at that time I heard that and the Spirit just testified to me so strongly that that was my situation and that that applied to me. Probably, I would dare say one of the more spiritual experiences I've ever had in my life, driving in my little van down the road. And it just made so much sense to me. Every piece of that made sense that it was okay. It was okay if I had been married in the temple and if I got divorced. I wasn't going to lose my opportunity to enter into the Kingdom of God. 

07:18 

So that was my first big one, and that was when I really started to take some steps mentally toward moving there, because at that point the thought of getting divorced was just like "absolutely not. You just figure it out, you make it work." So it took me a long time to really kind of wrap my head around the idea that I was going to be divorced, wrap my head around all of my former judgments, as I mentioned earlier about getting divorced, and that meant that you were a quitter, that that meant that you couldn't figure it out. It was really a struggle for me to admit that. But I started working through it with that and I let my ex-husband know, I said "hey, listen, this is where I think we're headed. This is what's going on." And things just didn't really change, things didn't get better. So I just kind of put it in my head. But I will tell you that every time that I would pray about it and fast about it and temple about it, if I can use that as a verb, I would just get the feeling like "not yet. Hold on. Not yet, hold on." 

08:29 

And that went on for about four years. I will tell you that there were times that I was told "not yet, hold on" that I literally took my head up and I looked up in heaven, and I was just like "are you freaking kidding me? This is unbelievable and unacceptable," and yet every time He just said "just wait, just wait, hold on." And I did. It was very fascinating to me because there were a lot of things that I know now about coaching and about how we need to manage our minds and what's going on that I didn't know in my head, but that the spirit led me to do. One of those was to get to a place where you love it before you leave it. Now, I will not say that I got to the point where I loved my marriage to the point where I didn't want to leave it, but what I did was I got to the place with all of this constantly saying "nope just wait nope just wait nope just wait," I finally hit a point where I came to peace with that. 

09:33 

I remember very clearly the night before I knelt down and I just said "okay, listen, apparently I think I need to be here until my kids graduate. I'm okay with that. I will do whatever I need to do to do what you want me to do, and I will do my best to just make it work for the next five years until our youngest daughter graduates from school." I finally got to a place of peace where I wasn't in what I call this "emotional frenzy" anymore. Now, the emotional frenzy is a place where the emotions are just running so high, it's like our our primitive brain is back there just having a heyday creating drama, right? I felt like I had lived in that for a while and when I finally stepped out of that was able to engage my thinking brain, or my prefrontal cortex, and was able to go, "okay, so if this is where I am. I need to figure out how to make this work and I need to be happy here. Maybe not with my marriage, but I need to be happy as a person who is married." And so I hit that point, and I will tell you that this is my own little miracle. 

10:54 

I don't know if this happens to anybody else, but I woke up literally the next morning after making peace with that. I woke up the next morning and went "huh, I think it's time." It it just was so clear to me that it was time to move on the divorce and  so I did. And and I will tell you that as smoothly as divorce can go, mine went that way and I was so grateful to my ex husband that it it was not something that was ugly and mean and horrible. But how did I know? Those spiritual experiences. And it's not a decision that I would ever want to make without the Spirit, because it's probably the biggest, hardest, ugliest decision I've ever made in my life. 

11:44 

It was so challenging, it questioned everything that I knew about myself, everything that I felt about myself, everything that I believed about myself. It questioned all of that and I had to really get to a point as well that I could be okay with being able to say "I'm divorced" and owning up to that, because it felt like it should be such a shameful thing. I've realized at this point in my life that it is not a shameful thing. It's just a thing. But getting myself to that point...and part of that was finding that peace. So as I found that peace that "I know that that's where I'm going, I can handle the fact that I'm going to be divorced," because then you get a lot of questions, you get a lot of side glances but then you also get a lot of distancing from people who just don't know what to say and they are uncomfortable and so they avoid because they're uncomfortable. It had nothing to do with me, it was just because they didn't know what to say, they didn't know what to do. So I kind of had to be prepared for that and I feel like God, in those four years that I had before, from the time that I had that experience in the car listening to that CD and to the time that my divorce was final, I just felt like I received so much guidance in that area and so much peace around the idea that it was okay to be divorced. 

13:12 

So this idea of loving it before you leave it, I'll do a podcast on that because that doesn't apply just to marriage, it applies to everything else. But I think it was very important for me to find that peace, because once I did, it was almost as though I had already gone through the grieving process of losing a marriage...which, there is a lot of grief there in losing hopes and dreams and ideas about who you are. So by the time my divorce was final, I had gone through the grieving process of grieving my marriage and grieving the loss of my family as it was at the time. So I was able to to be finished with it and move on from the time that I was pretty much divorced, although there was still a lot of trauma, a lot of things I still had to work through, but that's how I knew I just knew from the Spirit and the Spirit guiding me and directing me, and me really seeking to know. So there we go. 

13:51 

Next question that I get a lot...this comes in different ways but the basic gist is "you're such a happy, positive person. How is it that you of all people could get divorced?" I will agree I am a happy, positive person, but I think as the years have gone on...that first year is really hard to see your own stuff. Really hard to see your own stuff that first year. I was just like "yeah, it's all him. It's all him. It's all him," and then second year came and I was like, "ooh, I'm seeing stuff that's me." And as I've continued to search, continued to get to know myself better, continued to understand things that I need to understand, I see more and more the issues that I brought to the marriage, which I think is so important. I think we have to get to this place where we see our own issues. If we are constantly blaming and pointing fingers, yeah, we're never we're never gonna move on and be able to be in a healthy place again. 

15:10 

But so back to the question. So how could I get divorced? I think my happy positiveness was probably part of that, because I did not have the emotional ability to deal with negative emotions very well, or challenging emotions as I'm liking to call them these days. The things that I brought to the marriage was a space that "hey, either you're happy or you go away, because I don't want anything to do with that." And that was very difficult because I did not have the emotional connection skills that I needed to have at that time. And I believe that was a two-way street. And so with two people really not having that ability, it really wreaked a lot of havoc in our lives and made it very very difficult for us to have a place where we could communicate and work well together. And in a marriage you need to be able to have these emotional connection skills, which I'm finding that I do have with other people in my life. And especially as I've done so much work on myself the last few years, I have connections with people at intimacy levels that I have never really been able to have before. I'm so grateful for that. That requires vulnerability. 

16:26 

I remember about a year after my divorce was when I encountered Brene Brown's work for the first time and I was like "vulnerability? What is that and what's the deal? Why is it even important?" So that's that's kind of where I started my work there and started cleaning up ideas and thoughts and realizing the importance of a lot of things that I just did not even connect with before. I think another piece of this is that when you're in a in a tough situation, and I believe most of us have  been in a tough relationship at some point, regardless of who it's with, we develop these patterns of behavior. And I talked about this in the podcast called "divorce trauma." I don't remember the number, 90-something maybe? But you develop these patterns of behavior and these patterns of behavior start happening at our primitive brain level where we are completely unaware that these patterns are happening, and these patterns are wreaking a lot of havoc in our lives. And yet, we're completely oblivious to them. We don't even know that they're going on. 

17:33 

And both partners in a marriage bring that, because that's how our brains work. And so we develop these patterns of behavior that become so ingrained and you're so unaware of them and it becomes very difficult to even try and figure out what those patterns are. Impossible? Absolutely not. I have some friends who do straight coaching with marriages and I think that we can learn to figure out a lot of that and see a lot of that and start adjusting our mindsets around a lot of that. But a lot of us don't have the tools or the skills or even the awareness to go there. And it takes two people. I'm a firm believer that it really takes two people to really create a good relationship. I know that everybody always says "hey one person can make a difference." I totally believe that, but to have the kind of relationship I think that that most of us want, I think...and I may be wrong on that. I haven't married again so I may be completely wrong. I hope maybe I am. I don't know. Maybe one person really just can make all the difference. I think they can make a huge difference but I don't know. 

18:49 

I think patterns behavior is the other thing. Like, how is it that you can get divorced? These patterns run so deep and after a while I think you're just completely oblivious to them. And there's a lot of patterns that I've only been made aware of in the last couple of years, as I really jumped into the deep end of the pool with this information, with what I have as a coach. Now, as I really started to look at myself, there are things that I'm just like "oh, no wonder. Look what I was doing," look at, you know, the emotional constipation, right? With that inability that I had to really engage with difficult emotions it was hard for me because I always thought that that we should just be happy all the time. That was very difficult on everybody, including my children. And my children and I have done some work with this and talked about it and discussed it and had some pretty frank open conversations about it. But there you go. So I am a happy, positive person...and how is it that I could get divorced? That's part of it, I think. That part of it was that I did not engage with those negative emotions I didn't know how to have those difficult conversations. I didn't realize that marriage was supposed to be messy and difficult and challenging because I never saw that in my parents' marriage. They always got along so well and I literally can say that I never saw my parents fight. So I had these unrealistic expectations and understandings. Definitely had manuals for how I thought my ex husband should act and how my children should act and how I should act. And none of those were helpful. 

20:31 

Alright, so next question that I get a lot...how do you heal after divorce? A lot of people are like, "wow, you're in such a good place right now." And I would 100% agree. I think I'm probably in the best place of my life. And I'm so thankful for that, but I will tell you what, it has taken me some work. Now I will, as I mentioned earlier, I did feel like I went through the grieving process before the divorce was ever final, just because I knew it was coming for so long and I was really working through that in my brain. So there's a lot of grief associated with it. Once my divorce was over, I felt like I was in a place to start moving on. Now there's a lot that still has to happen when you're ready to move on. And a lot of that is dealing with the divorce trauma, like all the thought patterns of what's going on. Just so challenging. 

21:27 

I think the other thing that really helped me is I started to learn to get really curious about what was my stuff going on. And I started to take responsibility rather than constantly pointing the finger. And I will tell you that even though I was in a good place by the time the divorce happened, I still feel like it took me about a year to stop pointing all the fingers at my ex husband. And it took me about a year to start seeing, "oh, look what I did, oh, look what I did." But those enlightenments for me came as I really sought to seek for more information and understand myself and get into a place of personal growth. That's when I was able to really start seeing things that I could see were not beneficial and that were harmful to my relationship with my ex-husband. So the curiosity for me was a huge piece. Really starting to get curious about how does this work? How do we create connections? What is this negative emotion thing? What is vulnerability? What are all these things? And I started to get really curious and to search out. And that's how I eventually found the Life Coach School. And this work that has been instrumental in my growth and continues to be. I still use this work on a regular basis and I adore it. I love it so much and this is why I'm always like I think everybody needs a coach because this work is so great. 

22:55 

 Another part of healing after my divorce, part of that process was helping me to reconnect with my self-worth. Even though I've always confident, felt good about who I was, it's hard to go through a difficult situation like divorce where you question everything about yourself, and not have your self-worth come into question at some level. So for me a huge part of my healing was reconnecting with my self-worth and getting to a point where I was like "oh, okay, my worth doesn't change. I'm still an amazing, fabulous, wonderful person even if I've been through this difficult thing." Learning to look at my divorce not so much as a failure but learning to look at it as what an amazing opportunity that I had to become the person that I am. I am so grateful for those tough years because I really feel like they helped me to become this person and I'm really happy with who I am and where I am right now. 

23:57 

Does that mean I'm perfect? Absolutely not. Does that mean I've got all my stuff together? Absolutely not. But it does mean that I have a clarity now that I've never had before in my life about who I am and about who God created me to be. More of a clarity of what I'm meant to do and how I can do that and what I have to offer the world. This is another piece of this healing after divorce, was reconnecting with my humanity, realizing that I didn't have to be perfect. Sometimes I still struggle with this idea that I have to be perfect in order to be loved. I'm doing some work on that, but reconnecting with humanity. Listen, I'm supposed to feel those negative emotions. I'm supposed to struggle. I'm supposed to have conflict with people. But the conflict does not have to turn into contention, right? It just can be conflict. It can be that we have different ideas and that's totally okay. Not feel threatened by other people's ideas, as I did a lot when I was married. So healing for me has really come as I just went into learning mode and "trying to see myself" mode and personal growth mode has been huge for me and my healing. And yes, I do believe right now that I am in the best place of my entire life and I'm so thankful to be where I am. My divorce was part of that process. There you go. 

24:46 

Next question I get: do I have any regrets? I will tell you I have one regret, and that's it. I'm grateful for all the years I had, I'm grateful for the struggle, I'm grateful for everything. And I do not regret filing for and getting divorced. There's no piece of that that I have ever looked back and went, "oh maybe I shouldn't have." I've always felt very confident with that, but that's because I felt like at the time I did everything that I knew how to do. I tried everything I knew how to fix it. I feel like I tried to the point of exhaustion. And then I also felt very secure in knowing that God was like "okay, it's okay, you can you can walk away from this." So as far as that goes, no regrets. 

26:19 

But the the one regret that I do have is that my children, my custody children as I would refer to them, my two girls, my boys were moved out of the house or old enough to be when we got divorced. But my two girls were still, oh I think they were sophomore, seventh grader or maybe a ninth grader and a seventh grader. I don't remember exactly about that. That first year they got pulled into the middle a lot. And if you can go back and listen to that discussion as well when I interviewed my daughter on, I don't know, 30-something episode that talks about divorcing the children. They got pulled in a lot more than I thought I was. I thought I was doing a great job that first year not pulling my girls into the divorce. And as I got out of that first year and a lot more clarity came into my mind, I started to see things. I was like "whoa, I have not been good to my girls." That's probably where my biggest regret lies in the divorce, is that I did not do a good job of not pulling them into the middle between their dad and me. And like I said, at the time I thought I was doing a really good job not doing that. But we just don't see what we don't see, right? And this is why having a coach for me has been so important, because they help me see things that I don't see going on and what I'm doing. 

27:34 

And then kind of a follow-up question, like with that, people ask me how my children are doing. I have two that are doing really good, one that's doing pretty good, and one that still struggles. I don't know what else to say about that. It's their journey. I may have given them the circumstance but they have a journey to discover beyond that. They get to figure out their own path, they get to figure out what to think about it, what to feel about it, their behaviors, they get to figure all that out for themselves. My job as a mom, especially as a mom of adult kids at this point, stand back let them figure it out. Be here to support them, let them know that when they want to talk to me about the issues that I created in their lives because of my emotional constipation, you know what, I'm here to listen and I'm here to apologize and I'm here to own up to what I created for you in our home growing up. And that's all I can do at this point. It's got to be their journey and they're the ones that have to figure it out. So I've really just kind of stood back a lot the last few years and just said "hey listen, I just love you. Just love you," that's it. And so for the most part I think they're doing pretty good but they all have their times, right? And some have healed more than others, I will say that. 

29:17 

Another question I get: what am I grateful for with the divorce? Oh my gosh, I love the growth that I have gone through in the time since. I feel like my own personal understanding of who I've become and what I'm capable of and learning about all of this emotional stuff, I don't know if it would have been available to me had I stayed married. Maybe it would have been, but I don't know that because this is the path that I took. And the path that I took has opened up a whole world of emotional growth and understanding for me that I was completely unaware of in the years that I was married. And I'm grateful for that in my own life and I'm also really, really grateful that I'm able to teach my children those skills as well and have these open dialogue conversations with my kids that would not have been available to me before, just because I did not have the information. I didn't have my own emotional...being able to understand myself, right? So that's the thing I'm most grateful for, is that I've created a healthy space for me and a healthy space for my kids. Those who are seeking to heal from this are finding it and I'm able to help them with that journey and I'm really grateful for that. I'm grateful that I've been able to teach my children that we can be healthier, that we should expect more than what they saw in the marriage between their dad and me. 

31:03 

And last of all, I get questions from people just saying: what would you advise people? What would you tell people? First thing: stop blaming, stop blaming, stop thinking that it is all your ex-spouse's fault and start taking responsibility and really start learning what that means. Really start learning what it means to take 100% responsibility. I know we've talked about that a lot the last two weeks, but this is key to being able to move forward and get to a better, healthier, happier place, is to really start taking responsibility for my piece of the puzzle, right? I brought a lot of dysfunction into my marriage and I never thought that I did. All the years I was married, all the years, you know, that first year after my marriage, I thought it was all him. And I honestly did. That's just so messed up, but I didn't see it. I could only see his stuff. So for me, the biggest piece that I would suggest for anybody is stop blaming and start taking responsibility, start looking at my own stuff. 

32:17 

Another piece: if you get divorced or if you are divorced, give yourself time to heal. This maybe is my own personal stuff, but I get so nervous with people who jump right into dating right after marriage, I think there's just so much that we don't understand about ourselves and about how we contributed to the dysfunction of that marriage. And I think it's important to take time to heal and important to take that time to grow into a new person. I know I've used this analogy before, but it's like saying I have a car that's overheating. And so I'm going to just change roads that I drive on. So when I get to work, rather than taking Bangerter Highway, I'm going to take Mountain View Corridor because my car's been overheating. Well, we look at that and we all just kind of roll our eyes and go, "well, that doesn't make sense," when of course it doesn't make sense. Just changing the roads is not going to fix the problem of my car overheating. In this instance, I'm the car. Just changing my circumstance is not going to fix me. And we sometimes think it will. 

33:29 

This goes back to that first thing that I talked about today was the love it before you leave it. Like fix yourself before you walk away. Before you just change roads, fix yourself. And then you can decide, "yeah, I just want a different road," or "I'm okay with this road." But I think we have to fix ourselves first. We have to fix our car because just changing roads is not going to fix the problem. And so I think it's really, really important that we start looking at ourselves more clearly and seeing what's going on before we start jumping into other situations. And I know darn well that there are people out there who jump right into another one and end up in a great, great marriage. And I just say, kudos and best of everything to you. I was not in a healthy enough place to do that. 

34:18 

And that is why this work has meant everything to me, because it has moved me into a place of self-awareness that I've never been able to be in before. And it helps me to see myself so much more clearly and to understand why I'm doing the things. What are my reasons behind what I'm doing? Am I motivated by love or am I motivated by fear? I'm looking at myself through completely different lenses these days and these lenses I feel are very, very helpful to me. Does that mean I'm perfect? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And all these great things that I talk to you about here on the podcast, I get them. I don't do them all. I will tell you that. I'm still a person. I'm a human. I'm still figuring all this out and all the nuances of how all of this works. But my awareness level I feel is just at a place that is it makes it so much easier for me to move into creating things that I want to create in my life. 

35:20 

So there you go. That's some questions that I get asked frequently about my divorce, and I thought maybe other people are interested in this kind of stuff as well. So there you go. And I will tell you that I have grown up so much in the last five years since my divorce was final and I am so grateful for these years. I would not trade them for anything because I just adore where I am in my life right now. It's not a perfect life, but I love the path that I'm on and I love the direction I'm heading and I love the things that I'm learning along the way, and this life coach gig. Love it so much. I love where it's taken me and how it has helped me along this process. 

36:07 

So that being said, if you feel like you are just needing a little bit more self-awareness, this is the place. This coaching thing such a good thing. In fact, I just got another message from someone this week who just sent me...I told you, on Facebook, and she says "listening to your podcast is getting me farther along than all of the coaching and therapy that I've had." I've received that message from several of my clients, that they're just so grateful to find the work that we do here because this work moves us forward. And what we don't need to do is stay stuck in the same place, rehashing the same things over and over. We need tools to move forward and I love the tools that I've been given and that I'm able to share with you. 

36:56 

So if you are loving this podcast my friends, please continue to share it with people that you come in contact with who you feel could also use this. I am your midlife coach and I love it so much. I love where we are in life. I love what we're creating at this stage and I want to help all of us create what we want. We've been through a life and we have made a lot of mistakes. But it's never too late for us to move forward and make things better. Okay, that's gonna do it for me today. Have a great great week and I'll talk to you next Monday. Bye 

37:33 

Thank you so much for joining me today if you would love to receive some weekend motivation be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.